All That You Are: Breath, Bone and Soil

That earth beneath your feet, a reflection on archetypes, yoga and the wisdom we can find beneath our feet.

There is an archetype we fall into, often without knowing it. If we’re not curious, we might never even notice. But the shapes we make, the roles we slip into again and again, not always consciously but often faithfully, are patterns etched so deeply that they existed long before we had words for them… they are often ancestral by nature.

So much so, that the stories we've told ourselves so many times, we often forget they are even a story at all. They are lived so deeply in our bodies, our bones, they become more than our thoughts. They have unconsciously become our breath, our posture, and our habits.

We may not know the full outline of the archetype. We might only catch glimpses, in moments of resistance, in how we react, in the familiar discomfort of a challenge we thought we had already met and perhaps even believed we had mastered, but that keeps recurring. The imprint is there. It's so deep, it's so ancient, and well and truly alive within us. Myth etched deep into the very marrow of us.

Archetypes, if I can take a moment to name a few, are old, universal patterns. Not fixed identities, but energies, expressions and roles we play out. The Caregiver, the Warrior, the Rebel, the Crone, the Healer, the Seeker, the Wild One, the Prostitute, the Earth Mother. They live within us and through us, whether we’re aware of them or not. They shape our responses, our dreams, our fears. And often, we inherit them, not just from family, but from culture, from stories, and from time itself.

As Marion Woodman writes:

“If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. A life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual.”

~ The Pregnant Virgin

I’ve found myself circling again and again around the role of the teacher, even when for a moment back in 2022/23 I didn’t want it, even when I longed to disappear and run away in my van, I kept the archetype alive. It's still very alive. I am a teacher! Or the Caregiver — that one’s deep in my bones, my fascia crawling, seeking. Even when I’ve had nothing left to give, I will keep going. These patterns don’t ask for permission. They just are, until we begin to notice.

I was watching a documentary on The Ark Project, and it set something off inside me, a quiet hum in the background of my thoughts. So here I am, writing this short piece to you. My brain’s full — I always feel that I am a tangle of ideas, always reading, reflections bouncing off each other. I can see them shaping me.

It’s messy, but I promised myself I’d write, so I’m showing up with what I’ve got, because it’s been a while... I am aware it's been a while.

Can you read between the lines? Can I be obvious enough in this writing? That which is so important to say... fuck, I hope so…even if just for me, a release of tension of wanting to speak, to write, but yet, still so bloody unsure, even it only means something to me…

So please let me know if it makes sense or not?? Right now, standing still in my own garden…

Right now, all I want is to make the garden wild. It’s too cultivated, too pristine. And while I’ve seen so much wildlife pass through, the upkeep is immense. As I’ve said many times before, I’m not a fan of the façade, especially the perfectly manicured garden.

Part of it is that I’m a very lazy gardener, yes, but there’s something deeper. I want to create a habitat, a living, breathing sanctuary for the wee insects, microbes, birds, and animals that have been pushed to the margins by agriculture and the human obsession with control and aesthetics... I want to look after what the perfect garden rejects.

The neat garden, much like social media nowadays, reflects a curated ideal — not real life and not particularly nourishing for the soul. But today, as I write this, and if like me you follow a certain cause, there is nothing curated. There is simply only heartbreak. The soil holds our histories, our triumphs and our tragedies, our bones. Buried deep within earth is a living and breathing organism. Even in death, it is full and alive.

And I’m more interested in the ground beneath our feet than I am in the latest Shein fashion. What happens when we let things decompose, rewild, and root themselves on their own terms? But what if those terms are not your own...? Does death become life? Those lives are full of stories — from the smallest microbe to the once-beating heart of a human being.

So where on earth am I going with this post… bear with me, I am slow but my heart is getting there. WE are getting there ;-)

Everything I think about returns to yoga, through reflection, through those rough stillnesses that claw at you... asking you for more of you, but time, the clock pulls you through into another moment — because that is what life does, our idea of life that is. It pulls you through time so quickly that you think you don't have enough of it. So you take a breath and quicken your meditation, you rush through and forget why you are there... YOU forget YOU... and YOU, in your immediacy, forget everything else and just keep going.

But today, raking the topsoil my partner has just thrown over the compost of our raised beds, I turn towards myself, and I turn my thoughts to others too… those entrenched in... (G....) asking to be buried, to die just for a moment of peace, knowing that deeper I’ll find compost, and deeper still, I’ll find weeds — you know, the stuff that keeps our ecosystem alive and fully well. Those that feed the earth... my heart hurts, but my God it is full too, because that cannot EVER be taken away.

What on earth has any of this to do with yoga? Let alone archetypes?

As you know, I read a lot. I love reading — anything and everything, and all the in-between. Science fiction, fantasy, transpersonal psychology, Jungian psychology. I had a formal education but didn’t really take anything in... I hated formal education. I struggled being told what to read and what to do and who to be. So I decided to just read everything I could and everything I wanted to read — and then dive into the bibliography and read further. It’s that simple. (Always look at the footnotes and bibliography.)

Just like the garden has layers — the topsoil, the compost beneath, and the deeper dirt and weeds — our inner worlds have layers too. In Samkhya philosophy, the subtle bodies reflect this: from the physical body (sthula sharira), to the vital life force (prana), to the mind and intellect (manas and buddhi), and even deeper, the witness consciousness — purusha. Each layer supports and nourishes the other, just as compost and yes, weeds enrich the soil above.

These layers aren’t always visible. In fact, often, we’re ignorant of them. We carry on living, caught up with ourselves, caught up in projection, completely unaware that we are rich inside — just like the microbiome beneath the garden surface. Alive. Dynamic. Essential to growth. Just like the soul. Just like the stories that live in our bones and fascia, they are the stories that live within the earth beneath our very feet. The walls that surround us are vibrating with a life that existed long before we took our first breath into this lifetime.

This layered subtlety also corresponds with Jung’s view of archetypes, primal energies or patterns living deep in our collective unconscious. They’re like the unseen microbes and worms turning compost — that gold that makes your veggies and plants grow. Working silently, invisibly, yet powerfully. They don’t ask us to believe in them — they just act through us, shaping the ways we show up in the world.

Just as a garden left too pristine will eventually lose its vitality, a life too tightly curated, too bound, has the potential to lose its connection to the deeper layers of being… and it’s in these moments we lose our touch with reality and humanity.

But when we allow ourselves to be curious, to dig beneath the surface, to notice the compost, the dirt, the so-called weeds, we start to reconnect with the wild, fertile ground of our being. We connect with our common humanity...

And from that rich, living soil, know that you are the fierce new life that will arise. Do not lose faith in that, not now, not ever. We are not here to merely survive. We are here to root, to rupture, to remember and revolutionise. We are the wild growth breaking through the cracks, the composted grief becoming power.

From the ground up, we carry the archetype of the Earth Mother within us. Not a gender, but a force of reclamation. A fierce tenderness. A deep, ancient knowing. We are the ones who can offer hope — not the hollow kind, but the kind born from blood, dirt, breath and bone, beholden to sacrifice, because we are being shown the truth.

So touch your feet to the ground and feel her pulse in your soles. Let your imagination run feral. BE WITH HER. Let her ache become yours, her wisdom your guide. Do not choose a life of numb acceptance. Choose revolt. Choose radical love.

For those who suffer without rest, whose peace has been stolen — let’s hold them within our breath. Let the earth hold you as you hold them. And in that shared embrace, vow to become the wild, tender revolution our world has been waiting for. BECAUSE WE ARE HER REVOLUTION and WE ARE HER LOVE.

I am a mess of feeling right now. This might not make sense… but I AM FEELING… and I KNOW YOU ARE TOO and that is enough as we piece together what is to come.

I hope you can read between the lines of what I am trying to say. I write from my heart and I love your DMs.

Here are some practices that keep me sane :-) and deeply connected … allowing and embracing change.

Much love always 💚

Gem xoxo